Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta

An Essay on Metarepresentation

Bibliographic Data

ID23172011
AuthorsFrançois Recanati (0000-0002-8642-2954, corresponding author)
Year2000
Publication date2000-08-28
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueOratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherThe MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.7551/mitpress/5163.001.0001
OpenAlexW2776341009
ISBN9780262282178
LanguageEN
Citations received60

Among the entities that can be mentally or linguistically represented are mental and linguistic representations themselves. That is, we can think and talk about speech and thought. This phenomenon is known as metarepresentation. An example is "Authors believe that people read books." In this book François Recanati discusses the structure of metarepresentation from a variety of perspectives. According to him, metarepresentations have a dual structure: their content includes the content of the object-representation (people reading books) as well as the "meta" part (the authors' belief). Rejecting the view that the object representation is mentioned rather than used, Recanati claims that since metarepresentations carry the content of the object representation, they must be about whatever the object representation is about. Metarepresentations are fundamentally transparent because they work by simulating the representation they are about. Topics covered in this wide-ranging work include the analysis of belief reports and talk about fiction, world shifting, opacity and substitutivity, quotation, the relation between direct and indirect discourse, context shifting, semantic pretense, and deference in language and thought. Bradford Books imprint

History · Medieval Philosophy and Theology · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOI